Sunday Matinee: Pulp

Director Mike Hodges and Michael Caine decided to follow up the brilliant Get Carter with another gangster like film, the 1972 movie Pulp.

The difference this time out is instead of a serious and gritty crime drama Pulp is more of a comedy. It has goofy moments and jokes, then some gritty crime. Michael Caine stars as Mickey King, a novelist who writes books like My Gun is Long and The Organ Grinder under pen names Guy Strange, Gary Rough and the amusing S. Ódomi. Caine is hired to ghost write and autobiography of retired actor Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney).Rooney contacts Caine through a representative and Caine goes to an island to meet his new boss. There he meets an English professor who ends up dead in his bathtub. It seems that Rooney used to play gangster roles all the time and hung out with real gangsters and some of them are not too keen on having their stories told along with Rooney’s.

This movie isn’t as good as Get Carter is but it’s still pretty damn entertaining. Caine’s voice over narration works well to set up sight gags and in jokes galore. Mickey Rooney plays an almost parody of himself and the rest of the cast is great too. The movie has just been recently restored by Arrow Films and released on Blu-ray.